Ukrainian poet Oleh Lysheha (1949 -)
Song 352
When you need to warm yourself,
When you are hungry to share a word,
When you crave a bread crumb,
Don’t go to the tall trees —
You’ll not be understood there, though
Their architecture achieves cosmic perfection,
Transparent smoke winds from their chimneys.
Don’t go near those skyscrapers —
From the one-thousandth floor
They might toss snowy embers on your head..
If you need warmth
It’s better to go to the snow-bound garden.
In the farthest corner you’ll find
The lonely hut of the horseradish..
Yes, it’s here, the poor hut of a horseradish..
Is there a light on inside? — Yes, he’s always at home..
Knock at the door of horseradish..
Knock on the door of his hut..
Knock, he will let you in..
Oleh Lysheha, translated by Kames Brasfield from BBC Radio, 2012
As so often happens I get inspired by a Facebook post by Ilya Kaminsky. Today, he posted lines from the poem above by the Ukrainian poet Oleh Lysheha. On a horseradish of all things. Knowing the darkness overshadowing Ukraine these days this whimsical poem above is a delight. As Ilya says in his post referring especially to the last five or six lines: There is a curious combination of luminosity and playfulness here.
In the farthest corner you’ll find
The lonely hut of the horseradish..
Yes, it’s here, the poor hut of a horseradish..
Is there a light on inside? — Yes, he’s always at home..
Knock at the door of horseradish..
Knock on the door of his hut..
Knock, he will let you in..
I tend to write poems on the heavy side so a poem like this lightens my spirit. And when I read Oleh’s poem I thought of two other poems, not about horseradish, but close, about radishes. Poems that also bring a smile. That bring a lightness to my day. To remember pleasure and beauty.
Here is one by the larger-than-life American writer and poet Jim Harrison.
Zona
My work piles up,
I falter with disease.
Time rushes toward me –
it has no brakes. Still,
the radishes are good this year.
Run them through butter,
add a little salt.
Jim Harrison (1937-2016) from Dead Man’s Float, Copper Canyon Press, 2016
Oh, the balance of light and dark in this poem. Something poetry can do superbly as Jim does it here.
………………Still,
the radishes are good this year.
Run them through butter,
add a little salt.
This brings me back to this good earth. Its ravishing tastes. Just as Oleh brings me back to the so often overlooked things like horseradish at the far corner of the garden.
And I so love the radishness of this well known poem by the great Japanese poet Issa.
The man pulling radishes
Points the way
With a radish
Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828) from The Essential Haiku – Versions of Basho, Buson, & Issa,
edited and translated by Robert Hass ,The Ecco Press, 1994
There is a sublime symmetry to this poem. You want to find a radish? Let the radish farmer show the way with a radish. And of course there is a huge metaphor imbedded here.
How Issa’s metaphor informs much of the two other poems! I think of Oleh who was banned from publishing in Russia when Ukraine was part of Russia, who has obviously known great hardship. What a better man to point the way to the horseradish hut in snow! To find warmth in a place of snow and cold. To point to something that can remind us of life’s simple delights even in difficult times. And Jim, his life fading with disease, pointing to the taste of a radish with butter and salt. These things we can still praise, in spite of, in spite of.
Thank you, Ilya, Issa, Oleh and Jim!
2 Comments
Thank you for these poems—yes, we needsome lightness in these dark times. Here’s another: “Potato” by Jane Kenyon—
In haste one evening while making dinner
I threw away a potato that was spoiled
on one end. The rest would have been
redeemable. In the yellow garbage pail
it became the consort of coffee grounds,
banana skins, carrot peelings.
I pitched it onto the compost
where steaming scraps and leaves
return, like bodies over time, to earth.
When I flipped the fetid layers with a hay
fork to air the pile, the potato turned up
unfailingly, as if to revile me—
looking plumper, firmer, resurrected
instead of disassembling. It seemed to grow
until I might have made shepherd’s pie
for a whole hamlet, people who pass the day
dropping trees, pumping gas, pinning
hand-me-down clothes on the line.
“Pinning hand-me-down clothes on the line.” something about this line (about the line) moves me so. How simple description can say so much. Peggy, I was not familiar with this poem of Jane’s. Thank you for it. Best, Richard